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On this day: April 3

2009: The Iowa Supreme Court legalizes gay marriage in the state by upholding a lower court's ruling in favor of six same-sex couples who had been denied marriage licenses in the state. Marriage licenses became available to same-sex couples on April 27.

2009: Vietnamese immigrant Jiverly Wong, 41, opens fire in an immigrant community center in Binghamton, New York, killing 13 people and wounding another four before taking his own life.

2008: ATA Airlines, once one of the 10 largest U.S. passenger airlines and the largest charter airline, ceases all operations a day after filing for bankruptcy for the second time in five years.

2007: College Football Hall of Fame coach Eddie Robinson, who won 408 games over his 57 years as head coach at Grambling State University, the most ever for any college football coach at the time of his 1997 retirement, dies of Alzheimer's disease at the age of 88 in Ruston, La. Robinson, who coached at Grambling, a historically black university in Louisiana, from 1941 to 1997, was surpassed in coaching victories by St. John's University coach John Gagliardi in 2003 and is now the second in overall college football wins. Robinson was formerly also behind the late Penn State coach Joe Paterno until the NCAA vacated 111 of Paterno's victories in 2012.

1996: A U.S. Air Force airplane carrying Secretary of Commerce Ron Brown crashes in Croatia, killing all 35 on board. Brown, the first black man to head up the U.S. Department of Commerce, was 54 when he died.

1996: Suspected "Unabomber" Theodore Kaczynski is captured at his remote cabin outside Lincoln, Mont. Combing his cabin, FBI investigators found a wealth of bomb components, 40,000 handwritten journal pages that included bomb-making experiments and descriptions of the Unabomber crimes; and one live bomb, ready for mailing. They also found what appeared to be the original typed manuscript of the manifesto.

1991: English writer Graham Greene, best known for novels such as "The Power and the Glory," "The Confidential Agent," "The Third Man," "The Quiet American" and "Our Man in Havana," dies of leukemia at the age of 86 in Vevey, Switzerland.

1989: Pepsi dismisses Madonna as a spokesperson after her "Like a Prayer" video was called "blasphemous" by the Vatican.

1986: Actress and singer Amanda Bynes, known for the TV shows "All That," "The Amanda Show" and "What I Like About You," as well as movies like "Big Fat Liar," "What a Girl Wants" and "She's the Man," is born in Thousand Oaks, California.

1985: Singer-songwriter Leona Lewis, whose hits include "Bleeding Love," "Better in Time" and "Happy," is born in London, England.

1982: Actress Cobie Smulders, best known for her role on the TV sitcom "How I Met Your Mother," is born Jacoba Francisca Maria Smulders in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.

1982: Actor Warren Oates, best known for movies such as "The Wild Bunch," "Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia," "Two-Lane Blacktop," "Race with the Devil" and "Stripes," dies of heart attack at the age of 53 in Los Angeles, Calif.

1981: Airline entrepreneur and pioneer Juan Trippe, who founded Pan American World Airlines, one of the world's most prominent airlines of the 20th century, dies at the age of 81 in New York City.

1981: The Osborne 1, the first successful portable computer, is unveiled at the West Coast Computer Faire in San Francisco.

1974: In what becomes known as the "Super Outbreak," 148 tornadoes are confirmed in 13 U.S. states, including Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, North Carolina, Virginia, West Virginia, and New York. The event, at the time the biggest tornado outbreak in recorded history, left 319 dead, injured more than 5,000 and extensively damaged about 900 square miles along a total combined path length of 2,600 miles. The tornado outbreak wouldn't be surpassed in size until the April 25-28, 2011, tornado outbreak that left 324 dead across the Southeast, Southern Midwest and Northeast parts of the U.S. Pictured here is a "Super Outbreak" tornado that hit just west of Cincinnati. The tornado was rated as an F5, one of two F5s on that day that struck the Dayton-Cincinnati area.

1973: Actor Adam Scott, best known for his TV roles in the sitcoms "Parks and Recreation" and "Party Down," and for movie roles in "Step Brothers," "Piranha 3-D," "Our Idiot Brother," "Friends with Kids" and "Hot Tub Time Machine 2," is born in Santa Cruz, California.

1973: Martin Cooper of Motorola makes the first handheld mobile phone call to Joel S. Engel of Bell Labs, his chief competitor, using the prototype DynaTAC phone. That public demonstration landed the DynaTAC on the July 1973 cover of Popular Science magazine. However, it would take another 10 years for a version of the phone to become the first cell phone to be commercially released. Cooper is seen here re-enacting that first mobile phone call in 2007.

1972: Actress Jennie Garth, best known for starring as Kelly Taylor on the television series "Beverly Hills, 90210," is born in Urbana, Ill.

1971: Downhill skier Picabo Street, who won gold medals in super G at the 1998 Winter Olympics and in downhill at 1996 World Championships, along with three other Olympic and World Championship medals, is born in Triumph, Idaho.

1968: Civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. delivers his "I've Been to the Mountaintop" speech to a rally of striking sanitation workers in Memphis, Tenn., less than 24 hours before he was assassinated.

1966: The unmanned Soviet spacecraft Luna 10 becomes the first manmade object to orbit the moon. It had been launched from an Earth-orbiting platform on March 31, 1966, and completed its first lunar orbit in about three hours. The Luna 10 was battery powered, operated for 460 lunar orbits and made 219 active data radio transmissions before being shut down on May 30, 1966.

1961: Actor and comedian Eddie Murphy, best known for movies such as "Beverly Hills Cop," "The Nutty Professor," "Dreamgirls" and "Shrek," is born in Brooklyn, New York.

1959: Actor David Hyde Pierce, best known the four-time Emmy-winning role of psychiatrist Dr. Niles Crane on the sitcom "Frasier," is born in Saratoga Springs, New York.

1958: Actor Alec Baldwin, best known for his roles in movies such as "Beetlejuice," "The Hunt for Red October," "Glengarry Glen Ross," "The Departed" and "The Cooler," and the TV sitcom "30 Rock," is born in Amityville, New York.

1956: The western half of the Lower Peninsula of Michigan is struck by a four tornadoes, including a deadly F5 tornado that devastated the cities of Hudsonville and Standale and left 20 people dead. Other tornadoes part of the same system killed another nine people in Wisconsin, three in Tennessee and one in Kentucky.

1953: TV Guide is published for the first time. The cover featured a photograph of Lucille Ball's newborn son Desi Arnaz Jr. with the headline "Lucy's $50,000,000 baby."

1948: President Harry S. Truman signs the Marshall Plan, authorizing $5 billion in aid to help rebuild European economies after World War II.

1944: Singer Tony Orlando, best known as the lead singer of the 1970s group Tony Orlando and Dawn, is born Michael Anthony Orlando Cassavitis in New York City. Tony Orlando and Dawn recorded the hit songs "Knock Three Times" and "Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Ole Oak Tree."

1942: Singer and actor Wayne Newton, best known for his Las Vegas performances and the songs "Daddy, Don't You Walk So Fast," "Years" and "Danke Schoen," is born Carson Wayne Newton in Norfolk, Va.

1941: Rock musician William Jan Berry, one half of the duo Jan and Dean, is born in Los Angeles, Calif. Jan (left) and Dean (right) were best known for songs such as "Surf City," "Dead Man's Curve" and "The Little Old Lady from Pasadena." Berry died on March 26, 2004, after suffering a seizure at the age of 62.

1936: Bruno Richard Hauptmann is executed by electric chair for the 1932 kidnapping and murder of Charles Augustus Lindbergh Jr., the infant son of pilot Charles Lindbergh.

1934: Primatologist and anthropologist Jane Goodall, considered to be the world's foremost expert on chimpanzees, is born in London, England. Goodall is best known for her 45-year study of social and family interactions of wild chimpanzees in Tanzania's Gombe Stream National Park.

1926: Astronaut Gus Grissom, one of the original NASA Project Mercury astronauts and the second American to fly in space, is born in Mitchell, Ind. Grissom was killed along with fellow astronauts Ed White and Roger Chaffee on Jan. 27, 1967, in a fire that ignited during a pre-launch test for the Apollo 1 mission at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida.

1924: Actor Marlon Brando, best known for his Oscar-winning roles in "The Godfather" and "On the Waterfront," is born in Omaha, Neb. Brando also received six more Academy Award nominations, including nods for "A Streetcar Named Desire," "Julius Caesar" and "Last Tango in Paris," and is known for his roles in other movies like "Apocalypse Now," "The Wild One," "Guys and Dolls," "Mutiny on the Bounty," "Superman" and "The Freshman." He died of respiratory failure at age 80 on July 1, 2004.

1924: Actress and singer Doris Day, best known for movies such as "Romance on the High Seas," "Calamity Jane," "The Man Who Knew Too Much," "Pillow Talk" and "That Touch of Mink," is born Doris Mary Ann Kappelhoff in Cincinnati, Ohio. In a singing career that lasted 20 years starting in the mid-1940s, she also released 29 albums, with her songs spending a total of 460 weeks in the Top 40 charts.

1922: Joseph Stalin becomes the first General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

1897: German composer Johannes Brahms, one of the giants of classical music, dies of cancer at the age of 63 in Vienna, Austria.

1882: While standing on a chair to dust a picture frame, the outlaw Jesse James is shot in the back of the head and killed by Robert Ford, a member of the gang living in the James house who was hoping to collect a state reward on James' head.

1865: During the American Civil War, Union forces capture Richmond, Va., the capital of the Confederate States of America. Fires set by retreating Confederate soldiers to destroy bridges, the city's armory and warehouses had burned out of control in the mostly evacuated city, leaving much of Richmond in ruins.

1860: The first successful United States Pony Express run from Saint Joseph, Mo., to Sacramento, Calif., begins. The Pony Express would last a year and a half before the first transcontinental telegraph system put it out of business.

1823: William Magear "Boss" Tweed, the politician most notable for being the "boss" of Tammany Hall, the Democratic Party political machine that played a major role in the politics of 19th century New York City and state, is born in New York City. Tweed spent a year in jail for stealing up to $45 million from New York City taxpayers through political corruption and died in jail in 1878 while waiting for a civil trial in which New York State was seeking to recover $6 million in embezzled funds.

1783: Author Washington Irving, best known for his short stories "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" and "Rip Van Winkle," is born in New York City.

A.D. 33: Generally agreed-upon date for the historical crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth, the central figure of Christianity.

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